


Bent to Breaking

by Tangledtrinkets (Bellzandtrinkets)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-16
Updated: 2011-10-16
Packaged: 2017-10-24 16:50:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/265727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bellzandtrinkets/pseuds/Tangledtrinkets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>For a split second, there’s this crazy moment where he almost is willing to believe none of it was true. It was all some crazed dream from nearly dying, and this is Cas, saving him all over again.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Bent to Breaking

They never had a chance to swerve, and hit him head on like a brick wall.

The Impala flipped twice, before coming to rest, and Dean can feel ringing in his ears and hear the click of metal, it’s all too much like angels screaming in his ears, but since he’s not dead-Dead doesn’t hurt like this-he’s pretty sure it’s just how hard his head hit the wheel.

“Sa-Sam? Sam!” He calls, before he even really has consciousness back.

He blinks until his sight clears enough to see the steering wheel, and as he turns and realize Sam isn’t next to him, he begins to panic.

“Sammy?!”

He thinks he hears Sam’s voice, saying his name back quiet and distant, and he’s about to call again when-

“Well, look we found here!”

Dean can’t even think, before he’s ripped through the empty driver’s side window and tossed out on the pavement.

When he lands, it knocks the air back out of him in a rush. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d had any, anyway. The dress shoe on his chest would’ve made it real hard to breathe in the first place.

“Mean, I knew you boys were running around in the old hunk of junk, but I didn’t think you’d treat her so bad.” The Leviathan grins, leaning down at an odd angle, hair a bit too long, smile far too wide, and his black coat tossed over his shoulder. It still felt weird not to see the trench coat, but it made moments like this a little easier. Jimmy’s jacket and tie are gone, and he’s rolled up the sleeves of his shirt.

The trenchcoat had been back at Bobby’s. Until there wasn’t a Bobby’s. He doesn’t know if it’d made it into the car or not, the Impala or Bobby’s truck. But he’d never taken the time to look just in case it hadn’t.

In the background, the Impala looks pretty close to the name the Leviathan had given it, dented in at odd angles where She’d hit a person, and he realizes with a sick sinking feeling he had no place to take her to repair her.

The Leviathan looks back over his shoulder at the Impala, walks over to the wreckage, and knocking on the damaged metal with a knuckle once he’s close enough.

“She’s a real fixer upper but-Well, look who I’m talking to. She fits in with the both of you so wonderfully!”

“Dean!”

Sam’s voice comes from somewhere on the other side of the Impala, out of sight and sounding choked, like he can’t quite get the word out, and Dean hears coughing. Every instinct he has says to get up and go to his brother, but he can barely move, even with the monster no longer leaning on him.

“I’ll get to you in a minute, Sam” The Leviathan shouts before Dean can try to respond. Wouldn’t’ve mattered anyway, and Dean chokes on air and rolls over onto his side, unable to get enough air to speak, barely enough to really breathe.

He just grins down at Dean for a moment, before looking at the Impala, then back at Dean like he’s just realized something.

“Oh. Right! Sorry, this should be a…Real _solemn_ moment, shouldn’t it?” The Leviathan says, pausing to put his hands together like he’s praying, eternal grin fading for a moment in a picture of grief.

It doesn’t stay for more than a few seconds before he starts laughing hysterically. Dean would say something about shutting his face, or he’d try to call for Sam, but he’s too busy coughing up blood, too much of it to mean anything but a short clock and a trip back to the matrix. He can’t imagine any other outcome.

He can’t get up, he can’t get to Sam.

It’s over.

There’s a pause in the laughter as Dean spits out onto the pavement, and rolls onto his back, trying to stop the haze from taking over his mind, and something taps him on the forehead.

Instantly, he’s whole again, and Cas’s face is staring at him from a few inches away.

For a split second, there’s this crazy moment where he almost is willing to believe none of it was true. It was all some crazed dream from nearly dying, and this is Cas, saving him all over again.

Nothing’s ever that easy.

“I always forget.” says The Leviathan, looking so sincerely irritated it might as well be Cas for how the expression effects him. But it’s not. “You’re so goddamn breakable.”

He gets up, pushing off his knees to stand and wander over to the other side of the wreckage, hands in his coat pockets and skip hopping along.

“Saaaaaammy.” He says, drawing out Sam’s name, and Dean climbs to his feet in time to see that fucking thing kneel next to Sam to- and oh god, Sam. He’s bled so much that Dean can’t even tell where he’s hurt, it’s clear enough to know it’s fatal- the monster taps him on the forehead too, and Sam jolts back to the land of the living, eyes wide and cleaned of injury.

“Ca-You!”

It should make him feel better that he’s not the only one delusional enough to hope, but the way Sam’s face falls is devastating.

“You boys need to be more careful.”

“You’re the one trying to kill us, you fucking snake, you-“ Dean starts, and stops when, suddenly, it’s standing in front of him again. There’s no sound of wings when he does that anymore. Just a sudden lack of air, and there he is.

And there’s nothing he can do.

Dean’s a little too used to this puppeteering thing by now, Bobby thinks it’s just using telekinesis, but Dean’s a but too sure that it’s some actual kind of mind control to give him that one.

“Why would I kill you?” It says, grinning, and grabs Dean’s face with one hand, and yanking his head down so he can plant a lingering kiss on Dean’s forehead. “You two are the most amazing pets a guy could ask for.”

Dean’s stomach drops, and he can’t even breathe when he looks back up and Cas’s eyes are looking at him like that, like he’s insignificant.

“The faces you two make when you see this body…It’s fucking beautiful.”

Dean looks up in time to see Sam leveling Dean’s gun at the Leviathan over his shoulder, he must’ve lost it in the crash, and Dean catches the irritated expression he makes before it goes flying out of Sam’s hand.

“Sammy, just cause I like you doesn’t mean I can’t get my feelings hurt when you do mean things like that.” The Leviathan doesn’t even look at Sam as he drags him in with his other hand, and when Sam gets close enough, he grabs him like he’s got Dean. “When has trying to attack this body ever worked? Hm? Kiddo? Got an answer for me?”

Neither of them respond, and the Leviathan rolls it’s eyes.

“Now, boys.” He’s got this demented soccer mom thing going, and it makes Dean’s skin crawl. “Play nice while I go get some stuff I need to do done, I’ll pick you up later tonight after work.”

With that, he’s gone, and they both drop to the ground like their strings have been cut.

Dean’s shaking, and he knows it, he just wishes these little meetings would stop freaking him out so bad he can’t think, he wishes he and Sam weren’t stranded on the side of the goddamn road, and he wishes more than anything he could pray to Cas right now because Cas is the only person that could even hope to fix this.

Sam seems to collect himself a little faster, and he makes his way over to Dean, putting a hand on his shoulder and saying his name over and over until Dean looks up at him.

“What’re we gonna do, Sammy?” The words force themselves up out of him before he even thinks about it.

“I- I can’t-” Sam starts, and stops. Sam’s barely seeing the real world enough nowadays, but it doesn’t take much to know that Sam looks utterly destroyed, more than the usual level of upset that seems to stick to him even whenever they’ve got a moment of downtime. “Dean-” Sam’s breath hitches suddenly, and before Dean can really react, he’s got Sam clinging to him like a kid.

Dean tries his damnedest to be a rock for Sam right then, but he can’t manage much. They’re both covered in their own blood, and each others, and the car’s totaled again, and they’ve got no ground to go to. All he can think to do is call for Bobby, but that wouldn’t do jack with him three states away, and the closest thing they’ve got to a home’s totaled on the side of the road.

This thing’s enjoying ripping them apart, and by fucking god, it’s great at it.

“It’s gonna be okay, Sammy.” He says, not believing a goddamn word. “‘S gonna be just fine.”

They sit there for a while, huddled up like children in the middle of a backroad before Dean starts trying to drag Sam up by the arm.

“Come on, we have to start moving sometime.” Until Sam looks at him, he wasn’t totally sure Sam was even awake anymore, still as he’d been.

“Dean?” Sam says, voice rough and tired, and sounding so old. “Where’re we even going to go?”

“Don’t know.” He says, but continues trying to move Sam until he stands, probably just to make Dean stop yanking at him. “Think we need to start by grabbing stuff, changing so we don’t look like we lived 28 days, and start heading the couple miles back that way.”

Sam nods, but stares straight at Dean’s girl like he’s identifying a body.

“…We can’t take her, can we?”

“We can get someone to pick her up, and have them hold her till we can get her again.” Dean answers a bit too quick, not willing to follow the train of thought Sam’s on. “Sam. She’s come back from worse.”

Sam looks at him, like he used to when Dean would say something too sure of their Dad being back on time, or about things under the bed, and Dean feels about a foot tall, but he stares back with all the conviction he knows how to have.

“She’s stronger than she looks, Sammy.”

“Yeah.” Sam nods, and looks back at her. “She is, isn’t she?”

He’s got tear tracks through tracks of blood from a healed cut on his forehead, and he looks like he narrowly escaped Freddy with his life, but he’s breathing, and he’s got that look that means he’s set on doing what he’s got to, so they’re already better off than they could be.

So Dean starts moving, because he doesn’t know how to do anything else, and Sam follows.

Maybe that thing might return tonight, and maybe it’ll just keep tearing at them till there is nothing left, it’s not the first thing that’s tried, but they’re a lot stronger than they look too.

(Somewhere else, somewhere inside Jimmy Novak’s stolen body, Castiel tears at the edges of his prison and screams against the bars of flesh and bone and blood. Eventually, something has to break, and if he has any say at all, it will not be him.The Leviathan laughs, and the littler things holding on to it’s edges laugh, but Castiel has gone to the depths of hell, was fallen when he played part in stopping the end of the world, and knows more now than he ever has that he cannot leave those boys to this thing.

He will not allow it.

So he’ll fight until this body burns out or he takes back charge.

Either way, it’ll be a victory, and maybe it’ll buy time, or maybe he can actually fulfill his promise and make it up to them. Whatever it takes.

He’s bent to breaking, but not broken.

And as long as they hold on, he can do the same.)


End file.
